Archives for accessibility
An Event Apart San Francisco 2008
I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle pretty well, so the opportunity to play tourist in a new city was very appealing [...]
SPIN Seminar – Improving Accessibility and Quality in Web-Based Applications
The good people at Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) and OGI had me back to talk about Accessibility. I thought the whole thing was going to be cancelled – we had a tornado in the area that night. Unlike the midwest, I learned that tornado in Portland are very rare. Almost as rare [...]
A Few Dumb Questions
“I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions.” – Aaron Cannon, in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]
Bulletproof Web Design: One Paragraph Review
Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font [...]
It’s Just an Error Message
Raymond from The Old New Thing has written a great article to remind us that "The Default Answer to Every Dialog Box is 'Cancel'." He includes many examples, but what it boils down to is that average users are frequently intimidated by dialog boxes, and if given the choice, will avoid them. The solution is [...]
Nine Misconceptions About Standards
Phillip Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped has written a fantastic article, titled "9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards." In it, he outlines some common misconceptions that people have about standards. These are the kinds of things you hear from people who know just enough about standards to be dangerous. All of the items in his list [...]
Who’s Responsible for Accessibility?
Jeff Croft recently wrote a fascinating post and a followup which boiled down to asking where the responsibility for accessibility lies: the web designer, or the software used to access the website? His argument is that "the burden of accommodating the minorities should fall on the operating system and browser makers." This question really dropped [...]
Reversed Type Opinions
I find it fascinating that I keep stumbling across debates about whether light text on a dark background is readable/usable or not. There seem to be two camps: Those who argue that you should never use reversed type, because it's not accessable, and people who argue that it's not a big deal for various reasons. Light [...]
The Duality of Forms
Here’s a good article from Garrett Dimon on form design. In a nutshell, he says that forms which are intended for frequent use should be streamlined, while forms that are used occasionally can be lengthier, with more detailed instructions. The moral of the story is to know your audience, and how they use your tool.
How to Improve Accessibility
In his excellent series titled “Evaluating Website Accessibility,” Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street gives a compelling summary of what website accessibility is, and why it matters, as well as a very practical set of tips to improve your accessibility, such as proper usage of ALT attributes, testing with large font sizes and a screenreader [...]
Design Is More Than Making Things Pretty
Following on the heels of some heated discussions around the office on usability and design, I found a great post by Jeff Croft, talking about what web design is.
Derek Featherstone Interview
Digital Web Magazine has an interview with Derek Featherstone of Simply Accessible. If you’ve been following accessability for awhile, there’s really nothing new here, but it’s a nice overview, and he does hit on some things that I didn’t know. For instance, Technorati’s tag clouds are created using only nested <em> tags – which is [...]
